Jojo
More of a 3.5/3.75 sadly (since the first three have all been 5⭐️ for me)
I love being back with these characters, but unfortunately I feel like this book suffered from the trend of jumping back in time to see prior book's events from different character's POV.
As in Daisy Haites 1, I loved seeing Daisy and Christian's story, but I felt like Julian (and Magnolia, as a result) really overshadowed them here. I didn't really feel like it was necessary to see pretty much all of Julian and Magnolia's interactions from the prior book in his POV. I feel like a good amount of his chapters could have been cut in order to see more of Daisy and Christian, or even just Daisy and Julian having more interactions. I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of how he felt towards Magnolia just from their interactions in The Long Way Home. There was some payoff at the very end, but I just feel like too many pages were spent rehashing the prior book, and I actually got annoyed at Julian and Magnolia (and I've loved both characters in prior books!)
I'm hoping that maybe some of the things that bothered me will have payoff in Into the Dark, though. I still enjoyed the book overall, but wish we had spent more time with the central couple.
2.5⭐️
I started out enjoying this, but unfortunately I think this book suffered from only having Kaliya's first person POV. Pairing a single POV with a male lead (Danny) who feels like he's constantly alternating between hot and cold towards Kaliya, made for a really frustrating read throughout. Danny also has a girlfriend for a good chunk (50%) of the book, who then falls into the "evil ex" category within the second half. Additionally, Kaliya being way too quick to forgive him every time he pushes her away really started to bother me as the book went on- unfortunately, she began to feel like a bit of a doormat until very late in the book.
There were so many miscommunications between the characters, and since we kept having the push-pull dynamic until very late in the book along with a third act breakup that, while it wasn't the worst I've read by far, I did feel like their relationship development would have been better served by them tackling the evil ex's scheming as a team, rather than having another period of them putting a stop to their relationship due to conflict. By the end, I kind of still felt like they could be looking at a very rocky future, since we never see them face a roadblock and work through the issue together.
I did enjoy a lot of the discussions between characters about race and privilege in Hollywood, and I would love to read his parent's love story! The story within this story of them falling in love were some of my favourite parts of this book.
